Event

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An excerpt from Angle of Yaw by Ben Lerner

Photograph by Hester Angus

This week we continue to bring you work by the poets reading at the upcoming Poems about Nothing series at the Rubin Museum on the 26th. For more details about the reading, please click on our Upcoming Events tab above. Today’s poet is Ben Lerner.

 

from ANGLE OF YAW

 

HE HAD ENOUGH RESPECT FOR PAINTING to quit. Enough respect for quitting to paint. Enough respect for the figure to abstract. For abstraction to hint at the breast. For the breast to ask the model to leave. But I live here, says the model. And I respect that, says the painter. But I have enough respect for respect to insist. For insistence to turn the other cheek. For the other cheek to turn the other cheek. Hence I appear to be shaking my head No.

 

 

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Ben Lerner is the author of three books of poetry, The Lichtenberg Figures (2004), Angle of Yaw (2006), and Mean Free Path (2010), all published by Copper Canyon Press. He has been a Fulbright Scholar in Spain, a finalist for the National Book Award, and is currently a Howard Foundation Fellow. He teaches at Brooklyn College.

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Listen by Saskia Hamilton

Listen

 

The shaded window.
Voices from the garden rose to
the room and soon the green blanket
soothed you. The phone rang. A door
closed. No one turning
down the gravel path, no one
taking up the garden shears.

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This poem first appeared in Divide These (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2005).

Saskia Hamilton is the author of As for Dream (2001) and Divide These (2005), the editor of The Letters of Robert Lowell (2005), and the co-editor of Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (2008). Her most recent work appears in Joining Music with Reason: 34 Poets, British and American (2010).
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Oeuvre by Noelle Kocot

Toad Hall by Patrick Doughtery

This is a beautiful new poem from Noelle Kocot who will be reading at the upcoming Poems about Nothing event at the Rubin Museum on January 26th. Please click on our Upcoming Events tab above for more information about the reading.

 

Oeuvre

The purring of incidence in the light’s disappearance,
The ground of, how many held by something
Would add dark shades to the grass?  Turning on
The delighted sidewalk, I hear something ramified

By time’s purple flame.  A phone call every night.
A summer I climbed once.  A space between us
In that swelling river of roots.  You are a writer, a poet.
You are midnight when it got back on the road.

The birds scatter their cries in the quiet sheets
Of air.  Well-intended failure, oh this better be good,
Don’t eat too much, or, keep eating, or go out
For another walk.  There is a certain kind of history

The band plays on and on, murder’s patron saint, while
I make my little oeuvre like a bird gathering twigs for a nest.

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Noelle Kocot is the author of four books of poetry, most recently, Poem for the End of Time and Other Poems (Wave Books, 2006) and Sunny Wednesday (Wave Books, 2009), as well as a discography forthcoming in 2010 from Wave, and a full-length poetry collection, The Bigger World (Wave, 2011).  She has won awards from The American Poetry Review, The National Endowment for the Arts, The Fund for Poetry and The Academy of American Poets, among others.  She lives in N.J.
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Talks About Nothing Series featured on The Economist

The Economist recently wrote an insightful article on the Rubin Museum‘s Talks About Nothing series which featured novelist Rick Moody and physicist Melissa Franklin! Including our event on January 26th, there are still several others left in this series before it ends in late January. You can find tickets here.

 

Also, to refresh your memory, here is the official press release for Poems About Nothing:

 

RUBIN MUSEUM OF ART

presents

POEMS ABOUT NOTHING
Wednesday, January 26
7pm
$12/$10.80 for RMA Members/$5 student/ advance available by phone
Admission includes access to the galleries from 5pm-7pm.
Buy tickets here.

Himalayan Happy Hour and live music in the café from 5-7pm prior to the reading.

“if there’s nowhere to rest at the end how can I get lost along the way?”–Ikkyu

Poets Kimiko Hahn, Saskia Hamilton, Noelle Kocot, David Lehman, Ben Lerner, Brenda Shaughnessy, and Stacy Szymaszek read poems by themselves and others on the themes of absence, emptiness, and…nothing.

Presented in association with Augury Books www.augurybooks.com

RUBIN MUSEUM OF ART
150 WEST  17TH STREET, NEW YORK CITY   212.620.5000 x344  www.rmanyc.org

This performance informs the exhibition
Grain of Emptiness
Buddhism-Inspired Contemporary Art
Grain of Emptiness features five contemporary artists—Sanford Biggers, Theaster Gates, Atta Kim, Wolfgang Laib, and Charmion von Wiegand—all inspired by the Buddhist notions of emptiness and impermanence and Buddhist ritual practice. These artists are from disparate backgrounds and explore a range of artistic mediums, but all have inherited the practice of incorporating Eastern religious beliefs into their works. The exhibition’s paintings, photographs, videos, and installations will be complemented by performance art. For more information on the series relating to the exhibition please visit www.rmanyc.org/nothing.

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Poetry at the Rubin

Augury Books is co-curating an evening of poetry at the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan.

150 W. 17 St., NYC 10011

Wednesday January 26, 2011 @ 7:00 PM
Price: $12.00
Member Price: $10.80

Poets Kimiko Hahn, Saskia Hamilton, Noelle Kocot, David Lehman, Ben Lerner, Brenda Shaughnessy, and Stacy Szymaszek read poems by themselves and others on the themes of absence, emptiness, and…nothing.

“if there’s nowhere to rest at the end how can I get lost along the way?”

–Ikkyu

For more information and to buy tickets in advance please visit the Rubin Museum website.